"One of my first memories is of being read aloud to. My mother would prop me in a corner of the sofa and read to me before I was old enough to sit up by myself. But my parents were determined that I not learn to read before I went to school; they were af...

Robin McKinley achieved renown in the field of children's literature with her first novel, Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast (1978), and her reputation has continued to grow. Her fourth book, The Hero and the Crown (1984), won the...

Robin McKinley has been described by her friends Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold in Horn Book as a "person who approaches every instant and event with such boisterousness, energy, and vehemence that even the most mundane aspects of her life are infus...

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley The daughter of a naval officer, Robin McKinley spent much of her early childhood abroad. She attended college in Maine in the early and middle 1970s, during the rise of the...

By Tsipi Keller Spuyten Duyvil, 286 pp. $14 Built to Spill Chapter two in the solitary-woman trilogy The narrator of Tsipi Keller's new novel imagines herself to be a pure, uncorrupted soul, which may be her biggest problem. A graduate student...

Retelling is a simple, straightforward process in which students take the main ideas and important details from a text and say them aloud, either to themselves, a partner, or an adult. Like the related skills of paraphrasing and summarizing, retelling requires a reader...